Notes and ideas on mass customization, personalization, customer co-creation, and open innovation -- strategies of value co-creation between organizations and customers. This blog continues a long running newsletter, published and edited by Frank Piller, RWTH / MIT, since 1997.

December 12, 2006

Buzzword Collection: Wikinomics Is the New Crowdsourcing

Don Tapscott has been one of my favorite authors for a long time with regard to everything on the digital economy. Finally, he is also jumping on the co-creation and crowdsourcing trend and comes up with a new book on the topic with the wonderful title 'Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything'. Together with co-author Anthony Williams from New Paradigm, a think tank focused on business innovation, the book promises to provide an easy-to-read discussion along the line of Benkler's Wealth of Networks thinking.

The book will be published at the end of the month, and once I have it, I will post a review. But I already wanted to provide you today one more buzzword to impress your colleagues at the next holiday party: The next trend in business is Wikinomics.

From the announcement of Wikinomics:

"Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. ... Wikinomics builds on this research elucidating a new age where thanks to the Web 2.0 masses of people can participate in the economy like never before—creating a TV news story, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing a school text, inventing a new cosmetic, or even building a motorcycle."

Along the promised case studies, only the first in this list is new to me, but sounds very interesting:

• Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO, former investment banker, and gold mining newbie, who used open source tactics and an online competition to breathe new life into a struggling business cobbled by the rules of an old-fashioned industry.

• Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production that will revolutionize markets and firms.

Thank you for the kind comments about my new book. Crowdsourcing is a helpful idea but it is an instance of something much broader that we discus in Wikinomics.* The book will be out at the end of the December and I hope it will be helpful. The initial buzz is very encouraging -- EG Tom Peters just called Wikinomics "a breathtaking piece of work." We're soft launching www.wikinomics.com on Friday of this week with a full launch of the first true rich media blog early in the new year. Enjoy!

* Broader definition from the book's web site:

Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. And when these masses of people collaborate they can collectively advance the arts, culture, science, education, government, and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways. Companies that engage with these exploding Web-enabled communities are already discovering the true dividends of collective capability and genius.

To succeed, it will not be sufficient to simply intensify existing management strategies. Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call wikinomics. This is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject.

Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.